A Survey On The Teachers' Non-verbal Behaviors In Primary School English Class

The basic education reform and the revision of curriculum standards make curriculum content,curriculum evaluation and other aspects take great changes,and the teaching methods also have changed much from instilling teaching in words to a learner centered teaching model.It is far from enough for teachers to guide students to do exploratory learning while relying solely on speech acts to stimulate students' attention or interest.In English classroom teaching,nonverbal communication between teachers and students accounts for a large proportion.Teachers' non-verbal behaviors make English knowledge concrete and vivid,and can help teachers pay more attention to the communication with students.The use of nonverbal behaviors can encourage students,inspire students and then promote effective teaching.Relevant researches have shown that the study of teachers' non-verbal behaviors can provide great help for creating a more effective classroom English teaching.Therefore,this paper will make an investigation of the situation of cognitive and application of teachers' non-verbal behaviors in primary English teaching and analyze the gap between teachers' actual performance of non-verbal behavior of English classroom teaching and students' expectation in order to provide some effective suggestions for primary English teachers in the use of nonverbal behaviors.In this study,questionnaire and classroom observation are used as the research instruments,and the subjects are 24 English teachers and 517 students who are from 5primary schools in Yulin,Guangxi.English Teachers' Non-verbal Behaviors Questionnaire,developed from Zhou Pengsheng's(2006)classifications of teachers' non-verbal behaviors,is revised a little by the author.It includes six dimensions:awareness,paralanguage,body language,vice body language,space language and acceptance.Questionnaire for students includes five dimensions,which areparalanguage,body language,vice body language,space language and acceptance.The three research questions addressed in the present study are:(1)General situation of non-verbal behavior of English classroom teaching.(2)Students' expectation on teachers' non-verbal behaviors of English classroom teaching.(3)Gap between teachers' actual performance of non-verbal behaviors of English classroom teaching and students' expectation.Through the study,three findings have been found:(1)English teachers' nonverbal behaviors stay a medium level.Specifically speaking,body language is used by teachers most frequently,while the teachers' ability of using vice body language,space language and paralanguage is the weakest among the all dimensions.(2)Students pay more attention to the teachers' nonverbal behaviors,most of students like their English teachers to apply non-verbal behaviors in class.(3)Primary school English teachers' actual performance of non-verbal behaviors of English classroom teaching and students' expectation are significantly different between the two.Based on these findings,some suggestions are put forward for primary English teachers in order to greatly strengthen the primary English teaching effect.For teachers,they should raise awareness and give up clinging to the traditional teaching philosophy;they need more training and increase their skills.For schools,they should emphasize training on teachers,including the pre-service and post service training;they should improve the evaluation mechanism.